data interoperability

With Republican majorities poised to take control of the Senate and House of Representatives, the 2015 Congress is expected to address several health IT programs. Although controlling spending and promoting free enterprise remain GOP tenants, the approach by Congress to various health IT issues will vary...

Thanks to the bipartisan agreement authorizing approximately $16 billion to help veterans avoid the problems with health care that have long plagued the Department of Veterans Affairs, the bulk of VA IT support is headed largely in one direction...VA spending has been focused on development of its own electronic health record system: VistA (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture)...

The Department of Veterans Affairs has awarded a three-year, $162 million contract for upgrades to its VistA electronic health record. The announcement comes just as government officials assert in a news release Thursday that the multi-billion dollar acquisition to modernize the Department of Defense electronic health record is on track...

CAV Systems Ltd, a leading Israeli software company, recently completed development of FileMan Replicator, a software solution that creates and continuously updates a relational database replica of MUMPS databases, either Caché or GT.M, that are managed by the FileMan Database Management System. Read More »

In the year and 10 days since it was launched in New Orleans, the vendors of the CommonWell Health Alliance have been setting up the infrastructure for their vision of cross-competitive data liquidity. Now it's time to see what that interoperability can accomplish for the patient.

ONC chief Karen DeSalvo said it’s time for ONC to drive healthcare beyond the meaningful use of electronic health records toward the use of big data. “We have done a great job in the past ten years to get where we are, but I am really excited about the next decade to advance this notion to get data beyond meaningful use and advancing interoperability,” she said Thursday in a keynote on Capitol Hill.

Draft guidance published Friday by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration seemingly paves the way for smoother medical device interoperability by lowering the burden on developers of medical device data systems (MDDS) to comply with agency requirements...

Amida Technology Solutions, a Maryland-based open source software company, today announced the addition of former Governor Martin J. O’Malley as an Advisor. O’Malley joins distinguished public-sector leaders Michèle Flournoy, General John R. Allen, Sonal Shah, and Scott Gould in guiding Amida in the creation of software and services that will help NGOs, state and local governments, and private companies to solve their most complex data issues. Read More »

Health IT Now, buoyed by RAND's recent report on electronic health records, has called on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Congress to "decertify systems that require additional modules, expenses, and customization to share data," and to investigate business practices that prohibit or restrict data sharing in federal incentive programs.

The Defense Department's current approach to achieving health record interoperability with the Veterans Affairs Department is "manifestly inconsistent" with White House directives to adopt and use open data standards, according to a memo from the Pentagon's top systems evaluator. Read More »

It’s time for patients to come to terms with the fact that there is no financial incentive for healthcare providers to consolidate and normalize data from disparate providers. Patients must be cautious maintaining their patient records on a blockchain or another platform that cannot be used by other institutions, providers, or entities. Without portability, blockchains will add little value to advance patient medical record mobility. Healthcare providers may discover some indirect benefits from the consolidation of medical records — even records not immediately accessible by patients...

Time is running out for vendors to submit bids on the planned $11 billion, 10-year contract to deliver an electronic health records system to the Defense Department. The DOD Healthcare Management System Modernization (DHMSM -- pronounced "dim sum") is an ambitious plan to transform the delivery of care to the 9.6 million active-duty service members, their dependents, retirees and others...

As the healthcare industry pulls in buckets of information from electronic health records, wearables and health apps, "more data, more problems" is becoming a new refrain. That's where the National Quality Forum and Peterson Center on Healthcare step in--trying to make the case for use of big data while advocating for meaningful quality frameworks for the information, according to an article at HealthITAnalytics.

The President's Executive Order on Open Government Data states, "Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable." Interestingly, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), has a tradition of expansive disclosure of information and/or data it generates or collects – contrary to current practices at the FDA. Hopefully, changes being made to 'open up' the FDA will start to accelerate. Read More »